


Ships in the Night

by robotboy



Category: Black Sails
Genre: (I promise), Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood Kink, Canon-Typical Violence, Fix-It of Sorts, Literary References & Allusions, M/M, Multi, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-14
Updated: 2018-10-12
Packaged: 2019-07-12 03:42:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 23
Words: 11,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15986876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/robotboy/pseuds/robotboy
Summary: You dream for a lifetime of your one great love. James Flint has always dreamt of the sea.





	1. Something dark in the Deep

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edited to add: so many literary (and not-so-literary) quotes.

 

"Tell me about a complicated man.  
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost  
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,  
and where he went, and who he met, the pain  
he suffered in the storms at sea, and how  
he worked to save his life and bring his men  
back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,  
they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god  
kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,  
tell the old story for our modern times.  
Find the beginning."

_ The _ _Iliad,_ Homer (translated by Emily Wilson)

* * *

James Flint has always dreamt of the sea. He drifts in and out of it, finding he compensates for its rocking even on land, hearing waves lapping indoors, smelling fresh salt air in the midst of a tavern with his new friend, Hal Gates. It seems a condition of being _Mister Flint_ , the stranger from the water.

‘Why don’t you buy some company?’ Gates suggests. The two of them watch the working girls prowl for men about the tables. ‘Loosen yourself up.’

‘I’d rather be tight,’ Flint quips, filling their drinks again.

Gates laughs, and Flint lets him take the pun however he wishes. They watch a man go doe-eyed over the girl in his lap, as if there’s nobody else in the room.

‘Half the girls you meet will tell you _you’re the man of her dreams_. Happens enough that it must be true, once in a blue moon,’ Gates muses.

Flint doesn’t react. He’s had a lifetime of learning not to react, when people talk about their dreams.

‘Do they believe that stuff?’ he asks, hanging skepticism over his curiosity.

‘That you dream for a lifetime of your one great love? Only people who say they don’t believe it,’ Gates lowers his chin and raises his eyebrows. ‘Are the ones who don’t _want_ to believe it.’

Flint doesn’t scoff. Pirates are superstitious, but they’re not sentimental.

Among gentlemen, it was never spoken of: it was highly improper. Few among the wealthy had the leisure of marrying true-loves. For a man to acknowledge that his wife _was_ the woman he dreamt of was almost as frightful as admitting she _wasn’t_. To pine over the sparse and scattered clues left to us in our sleep was a private indulgence.

That taboo protected Flint, who knew his dreams were less proper than most. He has guarded his dreams for his entire life. They are vivid but vague; lovely but damning.

‘Men see patterns when they want to see them,’ Flint echoes, topping up their ale. ‘And they refuse to see them when they don’t.’

Gates notices he’s being evasive, and answers it only with more honesty.

‘I used to think folks were insufferable, preaching it was true,’ Gates says. ‘Until I saw it myself.’

There must be naked surprise in Flint’s expression. Gates offers the story so candidly.

‘I met her in Kingston. You know, some things call to you before, like omens?’ he says it as though it’s common knowledge, but Flint has never heard the possibility voiced so clearly. ‘It was raining, and sunshine at the same time. And I’d dream of eating oranges. Still don’t know if that’s what took me there that day, or if I always liked them, or that’s _why_ I liked them. Doesn’t matter, really. I bumped into her at a stall full of oranges, and…’

He shakes his head, smiling, and blows through his teeth.

‘There’s no words for it. That’s really why men don’t speak of it, I think. But I knew her, she knew me.’

‘Just like that?’ Flint asks. It hadn’t been so easy for him. Clues, yes, but pieces that didn’t fall into place on the spot. Threads still loose when the story cut short at _Thomas is gone_.

‘Just like that,’ Gates sighs. ‘I said her name to her:  _Elizabeth Violet Goodwin_.’

‘You knew her _name?’_ this seems too outlandish, of all the tales Flint has heard of lovers and dreams come true.

‘You know it when you hear it. And she,’ he laughs to himself, gesturing. ‘She turned my head away to look at the tattoo.’

Gates takes a long draught of his ale. ‘She had twins with her. A bonny pair of lads, the very image of her. And a husband.’

‘What did you do?’ Flint asks. As if falling in love with someone already married is foreign to him.

‘I bade her good day,’ Gates smiles a sad smile. ‘That’s all.’

The truth of it sinks like an anchor, disappearing in the depths between them.

‘It’s a terrible thing,’ Gates admits. ‘I see why a man would want to believe it was a coincidence. There’s those who never meet them at all; those who lose them; those who find them and can’t stand them. Probably most like me, only seeing them for a moment. I wouldn’t give that up for anything.’

Flint knows he couldn’t bear that. He _is_ Flint because he would burn down the world to have Thomas back. To be _sure_.

‘She grows lilies in her backyard. I feel the dirt under her nails,’ Gates touches his own fingertip briefly. ‘How they smell when they bloom.’

Flint feels something inside him unravel. He hasn’t been _Flint_ long: he doesn’t know, if Gates asks for a story in return, whether he is now the kind of man to answer. If Flint is borne from the loss of Thomas, from a storm he has finally allowed to break, then it follows that he should speak without shame.

‘I dream of the sea,’ he says quietly. It was the sea that he first found. _Married to the sea_ , they say. Maybe that was the truth of it. The sea brought him to the Navy; the Navy toNassau; and Nassau brought him to Thomas. There had been a moment, when he’d first touched Miranda’s hand, that he wondered if _she_ was the Miranda to his _Tempest_. But then Thomas’ eyes were the whole Atlantic.

‘There you are, then,’ Gates says, breaking their reverie. ’The way you sail, I’d say it’s the sea that loves you.’

There are other things in his dreams. The word: _Nassau_. The bristling thrill of a challenge. A stomp; another stomp. Glass worn smooth and opaque by sand. Ink, on paper—too late. A name on the tip of his tongue. And among all these mysteries, his love is undoubtedly, unluckily, undeniably a man.

His dreams keep themselves hidden, from the world and sometimes from himself. There are shadows under the waves that might be imagined, or might be something dark in the deep. But here, the Caribbean waters are a shocking turquoise and clear as glass. Here, he thinks he begins to make out the shape of what’s missing.

Here, he meets another man with eyes the colour of the sea.


	2. the Slivers jammed between

Silver has met a hundred men named James. He hardly thinks of it any more, though he guesses _Flint_ is a pseudonym. From the Captain’s bearing and discipline, Silver takes him for a former officer. That, and the intimate resentment Flint seems to hold for a country can only come from serving it. Silver allows himself only a moment to indulge thoughts of what Flint’s last name had been. He allows himself much longer to indulge the memories of Flint’s blade at his throat, hands fisted in his shirt, breath close enough to taste, his snarling smile, and a spark between them like two stones striking. He bites into his palm as he comes and thinks _Flint_ will do nicely.

There’s a city in England that used to be under the sea. As a boy, Silver found fossils of fish in the chalky ground. It was impossible to build anything, the men said, when the nearest decent stone was in Normandy.

Only one stone could be found beneath that city that had once been the sea. It was black and brittle and hard as glass. Every wall was an uneven jumble of knobbly rocks, held together with generous mortar.  They were sharp little stones that had no business being knapped into pitted squares, forced into civilisation. Silver used to run his hands over the shims—the slivers jammed between the uneven stones—with an impish hope one would be sharp enough to bite his fingertips.

He has almost dropped the nasal vowels that tied him to a place where nothing could be built. There are scars fading on his fingertips, faint lines of silver.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Norwich is a real city made out of flint, and it may or may not be responsible for Australian accents.


	3. of the Atlantic

“… a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”

_ Moby Dick,  _ Herman Melville

* * *

 

Flint’s fingers brush over the book. The cover turns easily as he tilts it, the spine soft from the many times it has been read. Thomas’ large and curling hand takes up so much of the page.

The dark blue of the Atlantic grows more distant with every day.


	4. there's Nowhere in Nassau

Silver listens to the story of the _Odyssey_ and thinks there’s nowhere in Nassau so far inland that nobody would recognise an oar. Only pure stubbornness could drive a man to make a city from flint.


	5. how to make a Man breathe again

“… their home is always with them—the ship; and so is their country—the sea. One ship is very much like another, and the sea is always the same.”

_Heart of Darkness_ , Joseph Conrad  


* * *

 

Flint surrenders himself to the sea, and Silver follows before he can think why. He executes a far better dive than the last one he took from the Walrus, at least. Flint is a silhouette in the depths, his downward path marked by a twisting trail of blood.

Flint is so close to the bottom that Silver follows him the last few feet, using the sea floor to push them both upward. The drag of Flint’s weight almost pulls them back to their doom, and Silver’s mind begins to clamour for air. He considers why he shouldn’t just let the damned sea keep Flint. But this close to the shore, the swell is nudging them gradually into the shallows, as easily as she had stormed with Flint’s anticipation the night before, as she had snatched Billy to her depths when he crossed the Captain. The surface is still too far, though, and Silver begins to fear she wants Flint and Silver both.

A wave picks him up and catapults him, coughing, into the foamy shore. Flint is tossed beside him, water leaking from the corner of his mouth.

Silver mutters every curse he knows and tugs Flint past the tide line, dumping him in the sand. He wrestles Flint’s jacket off, wishing he’d left the damned heavy thing in the ocean. He lets the rest of the water trickle from Flint’s lips before rolling him onto his back. Silver recalls only a theory of how to make a man breathe again, but he tilts Flint’s jaw up and pinches his nose and covers Flint’s mouth with his own. It feels almost nothing like the kiss he’d like to steal, and it ends with Flint almost cracking their skulls together when he finally coughs, vomiting the last of the seawater and rasping through breaths of his own. As Flint swoons back into unconsciousness, Silver finishes the work of stripping him to the waist and dressing the bullet wound.

Under the sand and blood, Silver discovers a breathtaking number of freckles dappling Flint’s skin like a spotted cat. The thickest clusters are on his shoulders, lovely enough to make Silver bite his lip, and he claims his reward for saving Flint’s life by touching them softly, secretly. He tiptoes a path down to the crescent tattooed on Flint’s arm.

Men still navigate by the night sky. Silver maps a course through the stars.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Like me, John Silver probably has very outdated and dangerous fist aid training. Do not try this at home or the beach.


	6. around his Throat, like Ink

“and then, in dreaming,  
The clouds methought would open and show riches  
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked  
I cried to dream again.”

 _The Tempest_ , William Shakespeare

* * *

Silver has a hundred smiles, and Flint, against his better judgement, is beginning to like each one more than the last. His favourite is the one Silver gives him after they steal a warship together, as he suggests their conspiracy to reclaim the Captaincy. Silver recognises Flint’s ambition and instead of tempering it he stokes it, and the thrill it gives Flint is not just anticipation. It is something he has missed dearly.

Silver steps before the crew and takes their blows well for a man who claimed to have a low pain threshold. But then, he lies beautifully too, even as he’s exposing unwelcome truths to the crew. He stumbles, vulnerable and lovely, into the kitchens, and recounts an anecdote that Flint refuses to react to. Not yet. Not when the hungry thing that lurks in the depths of Flint can _smell_ the blood on Silver’s face. He strokes his beard with the back of his fingers and Silver stares. From there, it’s only a matter of time.

As exiles, the two of them have been burrowed in the hold of the warship, with nothing but a pile of blankets between crates that offers privacy from Randall, if not each other. Silver lets Flint lead them there, but the moment Flint’s boots are off Silver is crawling into his lap.

In response, Flint grabs his throat. For the first heartbeat it’s so Silver doesn’t get too presumptuous, the second because inexplicable uncertainty seizes him, and the third because Silver seems to enjoy it. Flint’s fingers press and find the fluttering pulse underneath. Silver’s breath is warm and rushed on his face. There is a wicked flash of white teeth Flint answers with a snarl, then they are clashing, crashing, Flint’s grip shifting to Silver’s jaw as the kiss grows too deep too fast. It’s devouring and drowning and devilish all at once, and Flint thinks he was right to hesitate but he wouldn’t stop for five million pieces of eight.

Undressing in the tight space involves a painful elbow and a panicked pause confirming nobody was awakened. They burrow into the blankets and then Silver is naked, pressing against Flint, and it’s Flint’s heart that races. Silver thumbs Flint’s tattoo, and it’s too dark for him to know where it is except from memory. He has been looking, then, as Flint has watched him for a while in return. Now, he touches, from collarbone to chest, circling Silver’s nipple. Silver writhes, quivering when Flint flicks with a fingernail. He feels Silver’s face scrunching as he trails toward his underarm, at first pulling ticklishly away and then draping the arm over Flint’s shoulder, allowing him.

He stays there a moment longer, exploring the patch of dark hair and the rich smell, then moves down until he can run his thumb along the indentation of Silver’s hip. Silver ruts against him, seeking a blind and hungry kiss. He takes Flint’s wrist and guides him to reach for a handful of firm ass. Flint squeezes and Silver, apparently the vocal type, whines under his breath and grinds their cocks together. Flint hushes him, which Silver doesn’t heed in the slightest. He writhes for more friction, and the hand that had been caught between their bodies finds its way to Flint’s cock. It throbs at the touch, and Silver hums with as much pleasure as Flint feels. Silver’s tongue curls around Flint’s earlobe, flicking and pulling the stud between his teeth. Flint wants to stroke Silver back, to undo him as far as he has been undone himself, and Silver has released the grip on his wrist but Flint can’t, for one blessed moment, think. Silver’s mouth travels along Flint’s neck in a wet trail of mouthing and licking, until his chin rests on Flint’s collarbone and Flint realises he’s looking up as he jerks Flint’s cock in a cryptic, twisting rhythm.

Silver gives him a smile of pure mischief and this one, _this one_ is Flint’s favourite, because this one precedes Silver’s finger slipping between the cheeks of his ass. Flint would never have let him if he’d asked, but Silver has a way of knowing his way like a knife between ribs. The blunt tip of Silver’s finger teases and Flint shudders helplessly, his thigh hooking around Silver’s and clenching, pleading. Silver presses in, less than an inch, and Flint’s hand is clapping over his own mouth as it had Silver’s when they first boarded the ship. He won’t gasp, and more importantly, he won’t beg for more. It’s enough, anyway, Silver stroking him with his other hand and watching Flint’s brow crumpling, his nostrils flaring, the embarrassing sting of tears in the corners of his eyes when Silver’s finger twitches. Not allowing himself a sound, a breath, brings him quickly to the edge, and he comes wracked with shivers, not realising until he’s finished that the hand not covering his face is fisted tightly in Silver’s hair, pulling them together.

Silver bares his throat as Flint pulls harder, and Flint’s other hand finding Silver’s cock. He sinks his teeth into Silver’s pulse, marking places that will be hidden by a curtain of hair and all the violence of the last few days. Silver is a sweating, shameless mess, Flint dragging Silver’s lips to his ear to catch the bitten-back whimpers as he comes in Flint’s hand.

Flint should go. He shouldn’t lie here with his arms around Silver, where their kisses can grow lazy, their hands wandering new territories, trapping a warmth between them and breathing with the waves that lap the wood beside their heads. He wouldn’t even need an excuse to get up and prowl his warship, as a jaguar stalks its prey.

He stays.

He asks about Solomon Little that night, while it’s still passable as small talk. He touches the deepening bruise around Silver’s eye. ‘What happened to him? Your friend?’

He’s aware Silver likely won’t know, or he’ll lie, or it won’t be a happy truth. But that name, _Solomon Little_ , has haunted him, an intangible shape curling on his tongue for as long as he can remember. He used to mouth the syllables against skin covered with the finest, lightest hair that shifted with his breath. Unvoiced, he could turn it into the ‘ _om_ ’ of Thomas, an _L_ slipping between _I_ and _T_ , convincing himself his dreams had lied.

‘He died,’ Silver says, his voice soft and faraway enough that Flint is, perhaps in spite of himself, convinced.

During his fourth address, Silver stomps twice on the wood and Flint’s heart skips both beats.

Silver slinks into the captain’s cabin later and Flint kisses him so hard the cut in his lip splits open. Silver bites him back with a devilish grin. The ship rides the fresh gale that draws them to Nassau and Silver rolls his weight with the rhythm of it, landing on top of Flint. His hair tumbles to one side, mimicking the movement of the waves. Flint thinks of riptides in the dark, of krakens coiling deadly in the deep, and he’s ensnared by it, doomed by it.

Silver bathes in the attention, perfectly aware of his assets, and fishes from his pocket a stolen ink bottle from Flint’s desk filled with stolen oil from the kitchen. He strips, and Flint lets himself be stripped in turn, and Silver crawls on him, fingers making patterns of Flint’s freckles and raking through the hair running from Flint’s chest to his waist. Silver’s tongue is as clever on his cock as it was everywhere else. He laves at Flint like he’s starving, acting clumsier than he is. Flint rubs Silver’s scalp and steers him, pushing Silver a little deeper than he expects Silver can take, but Silver swallows with a moan that echoes alarmingly in the spacious cabin. He reminds Flint of the privacy they have when he finally pulls off, lips sticky and sliding along the side of Flint’s cock, purring ‘ _Captain_ …’ and making Flint roll his eyes.

‘Captain,’ he repeats, and Flint bats him on the cheek. Silver continues to nuzzle him, tongue darting out to taste, as he says, ‘I could climb on and ride you, if that’s what you want.’

Flint is too busy watching to reply, entranced by the wanton hunger Silver performs so well. Then he sees his favourite smile, feels it pull Silver’s mouth where it brushes the sensitive skin of his shaft. ‘Or…’ Silver offers, and Silver’s thumb finds a spot behind his balls that makes him feel like the whole warship has capsized.

Silver kisses Flint’s thigh as he guides it up, face still burying in Flint’s crotch as he slicks his fingers with oil and drives all the air out of Flint at once.

In a moment, Flint would swear blind that the only dream he’s ever wanted to come true is to have three fingers inside him.

Silver, he suspects, would tease him into eternity unless Flint stopped him. ‘Get on with it,’ he growls with more venom than Silver deserves. But the last thing he needs is Silver getting ideas about what this _means_. He pushes Silver away with his foot, and that affords him a very decent view of Silver slicking his cock, flushed dark and shining with oil.

Flint turns over, propping himself on his elbows and tucking his chin to his chest. Silver has the self-preservation instincts not to manhandle him, instead easing between Flint’s thighs. His cock is thick and full, and when he’s sunk into Flint completely, Flint feels Silver’s breaths short and hot against his spine.

Silver begins to move, and _fuck_ , Flint is reminded it has been a long while since he had anything but his own fingers. He clutches the sheets in his fists and rocks his hips back, moving a fraction quicker than Silver just to keep him on edge. Silver’s arms bracket his sides and his weight drapes over Flint’s back. Flint drives the pace, clenching enough to make Silver grunt from the feeling.

Those curls are falling on Flint’s shoulders, around his throat, like ink tangling in the patterns of Silver’s scrawling penmanship, writing its way into Flint.

Silver’s weight shifts and one of his hands pets Flint’s flank, beginning to snake beneath them. Flint snarls and snaps his hips. He’s still painfully hard from when Silver sucked him, more from how Silver fucks him. There’s an irrational fear that this will be revealed to Silver, as if Silver hasn’t intuited so many of his desires thus far. There’s a far more rational fear that he’ll come the moment he’s touched, and he cannot bear to forfeit in such a way. Not yet.

‘My _god_ , you feel—‘ Silver trails off with an open-mouthed kiss on Flint’s back, confirming what Flint has suspected to be an intense preoccupation with his freckles. Flint arches to it, causing Silver to thrust deeper. Flint feels it spark in the depths of him, and he sobs his pleasure into the pillow. The noise echoes through Silver, Flint feeling the muscle of Silver’s stomach curl as he sinks all his strength into fucking the noise out of Flint.

It pulls him under like a king tide, full to brimming, and if Silver slowed now Flint would pledge _anything_ to him for more, but Silver fucks him through it as Flint comes untouched, tremors wracking him as he clamps so hard on Silver’s cock he wonders, through his daze, that it doesn’t hurt.

‘Did you just —?’ Silver asks, wrecked and breathless through his astonishment.

‘Don’t you _fucking_ stop,’ Flint roars at him, hoarse with need.

Silver obeys him, for once in his life. He thrusts into Flint with a bruising intensity, until every ounce of pleasure is dragged from Flint’s body, until it will ache in his bones and show in his gait. Flint urges him to it with wordless cries and suffocating tension. Silver’s orgasm is wrung from him and he comes with a vulnerable sound, clinging to Flint like a lifeline in a storm.

Silver stays on him, in him, as he catches his breath. His hands are fumbling and affectionate on Flint’s sides, until Flint becomes too squashed and too ticklish to tolerate it any longer and he elbows Silver off him. Silver falls by his side, loose and warm, and instead of slinking back out of the cabin he nestles beside Flint the way he has since they took the warship, _their_ warship.

Flint wakes with a body tucked under his chin, smooth and hard and smelling of sex. The black curls part and Silver looks up, wrapping more limbs than seem possible tightly around him. And, like being shaken from a lingering dream, Flint remembers that Thomas Hamilton is dead. _Solomon Little_ is dead. He snaps at Silver to get out.

In the dawn light, Silver’s eyes are a shocking turquoise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fuck my dudes I hope you like nature similes because that’s what you’re getting. Is Silver an octopus? Is Flint a cat? Sharks? Is this the _Sharktopus_ crossover fic we’ve all been waiting for?


	7. a Story of two Kings

David was the partner of Jonathan and the father of Solomon. The way Thomas told the story, reciting beautifully from the King James Bible, they shared a love ‘ _surpassing the love of women_ ,’ a force that pulled rain down from cloudless skies.

David was a warrior who destroyed a giant. Jonathan was a prince, son and heir to the throne. He declared to David: ‘ _Thou shalt be king over Israel, and I shalt be next unto thee._ ’ It was almost a story of two kings, and Solomon their son. It was, the way Thomas’ words rolled over James, a love story.

James burrowed between crisp white sheets to kiss Thomas’ crisp white thigh where the Bible was propped on it. Thomas’ fingers moved from the paper to tangle in his hair. The thin pages ruffled softly at the removal of Thomas’ place, but he continued to read _Samuel_ from memory: ‘ _The soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul._ ’

In half an hour, James was on all fours and Thomas’ tongue was telling an entirely different story inside him. James ground his face into the crisp white sheets and cried, feeling Thomas’ laughter as warm as the sun. The Bible hit the floor with a loud thump, letting James forget how the story ended with David fleeing the wrath of the king, their final parting deep in the forest: _they kissed with one another, and wept with one another._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *taps microphone* ᴛʜᴏᴍᴀs ʜᴀᴍɪʟᴛᴏɴ ᴇᴀᴛs ᴀss ʟɪᴋᴇ ᴀ ᴅᴇᴍɪɢᴏᴅ
> 
> I am unchurched so everything I know about the book of Samuel I learned from _Kings_ but [here’s a beautiful essay on Jonathan and David that I stole all the verses from.](https://www.queerbible.com/queerbible/2017/9/8/david-and-jonathan-by-anthony-oliveira)


	8. written in Stars

Silver sees Howell’s blade and the whole world tilts on its side like a keeling ship, and a truth he has always known comes into sharp and horrible focus.

 _‘I do not want this_ ,’ he begs, because for so long he’s assured himself there’s always a way out. But destiny is written in stars just like navigation, and now he has seen the shape of this constellation he cannot _unsee_ it. He screams wordlessly for another path before it narrows into darkness, and the only concession he is granted is a dreamless sleep.

It cannot be called a blessing, because when he wakes up, one of his dreams has come irrevocably true.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have slightly self-plagiarised in this chapter, but don't worry, I have my permission. (It may shock and alarm you to learn that this is not an entirely original piece of writing.)


	9. trapped around his Hand

"They are the same and they are not the same. They are the same and they hate each other for it."

 _You Are Jeff_ , Richard Siken

* * *

 

At first, Silver can’t stand Flint’s attention. It knots together everything he hates: dependence, pain, vulnerability, frustration, permanence, and worst of all, yearning for the last time Flint touched him. He hates to _need_ , and right now he needs _everything_ from Flint, down to help with pissing.

Silver says something snide about the last time Flint had him naked, and Flint actually huffs a laugh—but then, any levity for the discomfort of the moment is welcome, even if it’s a stinging reminder of their short-lived tryst.

He wants to bite at Flint, and Flint seems content to be bitten. Perhaps it draws him from the hollows of his grief: god knows Silver will take any distraction from the pain in his leg. He thinks of, and immediately hates, the parallel of Flint’s heart and his leg, shattered and severed and lost. They’re nothing alike, except in their depths of self-pity, and their vehement denial of pity from others.

Still, more than once Silver has seen Flint dash tears from his eyes when he reads at his desk for hours at a time. Silver’s vulnerability is non-negotiable, but Flint has chosen to take Silver into his quarters, to shield him from the crew’s mollycoddling at the cost of his own privacy. Of course, it also serves Flint well to be seen caring for the crew’s beloved Quartermaster. So they are trapped together, spitting and snarling like caged beasts.

‘Can you bring me one?’ Silver asks, when Flint is choosing a new book from the shelf. Days of sliding in and out of consciousness, with only pain to occupy his thoughts, has left him half-mad with boredom.

‘They’re in Spanish,’ Flint says. Then he pauses, looking at Silver like he’s actually seeing him. He hasn’t looked at anyone that way since Charles Town. ‘You speak it, don’t you?’

‘Better than I read it,’ Silver admits. ‘But if I don’t have something to think about I’m going to chew off my other leg.’

Flint brings over the book he’d picked for himself, then his touch glides up Silver’s arm to his face. The backs of Flint’s fingers press his forehead, checking again for a fever. Silver begins to flinch away, sick of being nursed. Flint quickly adjusts to tuck a stray curl from Silver’s eyes.

Silver’s instinct is to sink his teeth in, the same as he had when he’d revealed that the Urca gold was gone. Anything to sting, because Flint has had the whole coast to ravage with his grief and Silver only has Flint. Flint tugs on the lock of hair, an oddly grounding sensation. It is a fresh, fleeting pain, so different from the kinds that have defined Silver’s recent weeks. It anchors him to the present, and to Flint. As though he needed an anchor to Flint, he thinks, smiling in spite of himself. Flint smiles back, a wry thing that carves a dimple in one cheek. Mercifully, before either of them can get too entangled in the moment, Flint takes his leave.

Silver picks up the book with genuine interest, opening to the first chapter. Most of the Spanish he read was shipping manifests, and eight years ago. The dull haze of pain interrupts him over and over, and he falls asleep with the second page trapped around his hand.

When he wakes, the book is laid on the crate beside his bed, the second page marked with a slip of paper. Flint returns to the cabin with dinner, letting Silver eat in silence while Flint readies himself to retire for the night. When Silver has finished, Flint has undressed to a shirt and breeches. He drags a chair to the side of Silver’s bed and picks up the book, propping his legs on the crate with his ankles crossed. He flips back to the first page, and begins to read aloud.

Silver finds the words flow easily with Flint’s narration, despite the atrocious accent. ‘ _Yo, señora, soy de Segovia. Mi padre se llamó Clemente Pablo, natural del mismo pueblo…_ ’

The ship rocks them with a choppy swell, and Silver pulls at a loose thread in his blanket. He twists it around his fingertip, until it leaves white lines carved in its wake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was almost watersports but[ I ended up writing that as its own fic here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17335733). Flint is reading _The Life of a Scoundrel_ , which I have not read because I’m not brushed up on my 17th-century Spanish literature, but I liked the title.


	10. Iron on Wood

Flint begins to dream of Death. She leads him inland, and he tries to follow. He wants to follow.

Miranda calls him back and he cannot hear her. When she begins to speak, he doesn’t _want_ to hear her. He only wants to stand on solid ground. But Miranda never let him lie, not even to himself.

Death is lovely, trailing him wherever he goes. He has given her so many souls over the years, stood so close to her, and she has never taken him. His destiny is something else. His dreams were never so simple as dying.

Death allows him audience with Miranda. They meet on a river, neither earth nor sea, a between-place. He rows her upstream, the coarse wood of the oar under his palms. In his hands it‘s still an oar. Inevitable and unmistakable. He finds he faces back toward the ocean, while she may look ahead.

‘Do you see him?’ he asks. Flint cannot turn himself to look. ‘Is he waiting?’

She smiles at him, that quick smile she had that was half-frowning, puzzled. She pities him, and he doesn’t know if it’s because Thomas is there, or because he isn’t.

She is a creature of the land, and Flint was conjured from the water. When he finds her in dreams, she is like Death: present, lingering, but never his. He was never Ferdinand to her Miranda. He has believed himself Caliban, hoped he was Prospero, feared he was Sycorax. But he was the storm.

The uneven rhythm of iron on wood drags him from sleep, back to the rocking of the ship. Silver approaches with a heavy step; another.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Flint is naming characters from _The Tempest._


	11. a Monster with too many Teeth

“Like all philosophies, the concept of All came about by fellas getting together and drinking too much coffee. And it was just the combustion of a fit of rage where Pat McCuiston and I were out fishing and were trying to fill the boat up with fish to where it would sink. And we were deciding when we should stop, because it was getting really full and the sideboards were like only about three inches above the water. And I remember saying, “We gotta go back in, Pat.” Pat just goes, “NO! ALL!” And it was like, there it was.”

_Milo Turns 50,_ Bill Stevenson

* * *

 

Salvation finds them down in the deep. Silhouettes in the darkness, the shape something terrible.

They come when Silver calls them, the butt of his harpoon thunking on the boat. Silver hands the harpoon to Flint and they hunt the hunters.

The speared shark thrashes as Silver secures the rope. Flint crouches behind him as a counterweight. Silver is suddenly conscious of how easily Flint could shift, tossing their little boat into the water, letting both of them torn to pieces in the sea. But they haul the shark into the boat, its hide grazing Silver’s skin as it struggles. Flint pounces on it like he had Singleton, and Silver is entranced by Flint’s blade sinking with his weight into its brain.

Flint smiles, a monster with too many teeth.

Flint twists the knife into the second shark and carves out a chunk of meat, peeling it from the corpse and handing it to Silver. Silver snatches it from him, sucking the flesh between his teeth.

The first taste of it on his tongue reminds Silver again of his horizon tilting, the sea under the city and the sky becoming the ocean, of salt water in his veins while they sail on blood. Now he and Flint are the terrible things in the shadows, driven as mad by the smell of its blood as the beasts below them.

He kisses Flint with the raw taste of the kill still on his tongue, and he licks the blood off Flint’s face, and they haul a feast so great it risks sinking them into the depths.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was inspired by and almost named after The Aquabats' [Shark Fighter!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3wchrctxFo)


	12. Something from a Nightmare

“It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to each other.”

_Frankenstein_ , Mary Shelley

* * *

Iron strikes bone, and Silver thrills at the crunching slickness of a skull giving way. The scream is bloodcurdling, ripped from somewhere inside himself he hadn’t known. The pain is far less abstract, shooting up his leg and gripping his entire being.

Dufresne’s blood spurts so high it stains Silver’s face, wet and hot. He tastes salt, and a monster with too many teeth roars to him from the shadows. He is something from a nightmare.

He stomps again, because he can.


	13. to ache for Days

“Oh! Hush thee, my baby, the night is behind us,  
And black are the waters that sparkled so green.  
The moon, o’er the combers, looks downward to find us  
At rest in the hollows that rustle between.  
Where billow meets billow, there soft be thy pillow;  
Ah, weary wee flipperling, curl at thy ease!  
The storm shall not wake thee, nor shark overtake thee,  
Asleep in the arms of the slow-swinging seas.”

 _Seal Lullaby_ , Rudyard Kipling

* * *

 It takes all day for the storm to break. The wind eddies through the beach, picking up dust devils in the dunes behind the half-constructed barricade.

Lightning dances over the sea. Purple sheets of it flash and the earth shakes in answer. The waves on the beach are restless, as if fleeing the dark line of water that draws nearer.

The atmosphere is so thick it’s like breathing underwater. Flint could swear a spark jumps between Silver’s hand and his. Silver’s curls whip in the wind as though they are alive, a tentacled creature swimming in the air. As they walk back to the Maroon camp, the black bank of clouds churns in their wake. Flint feels as though he’s holding his breath all the way to the cabin they share. The thunder becomes a constant rumbling that trembles in his bones, the lightning crackling closer with every step.

Silver shoves Flint against the door as he’s closing it, his fists in Flint’s jacket and his tongue in Flint’s mouth. Flint grunts in surprise, letting Silver wrestle the jacket from his shoulders. His hands find Silver’s waist, pulling his shirt loose. They kiss roughly, until Silver is gasping. He keeps their faces together, letting Flint’s beard graze his cheek as he rubs the fuzz of Flint’s scalp. They are both hardening, Silver pressing his thigh between Flint’s. He’s panting, still tugging at Flint’s clothes. The wall behind Flint rattles ominously.

He strokes Silver’s hair back, soothing the feverish urgency that’s possessed him. His own blood feels electric, singing for Silver since they first saw the storm front over the ocean. Silver backs toward the bed they’ve shared since they were given the cabin. He undresses, the lightning that blinks through the gaps in the wood illuminating the sheen of sweat that already covers his golden skin. The peg is left until last, the only thing Silver doesn’t rush. The leather of its buckles are beginning to bend into shape with use, soft as Silver deftly works himself free. He scoots back onto the mattress and rests on his elbows, drinking in the view of Flint. Flint’s own clothes are tossed about the room as he approaches, and he’s naked by the time he’s in Silver’s lap.

Flint seizes Silver’s face in both hands and kisses him. His knees clamp around Silver’s sides, squeezing as Silver’s cock slides along the cleft of his ass, already leaking and slicking Flint’s skin. Flint’s breathing grows frantic as he rocks back, his nails leaving welts from Silver’s collarbone to his abdomen. Silver fumbles for a bottle of oil hidden among the pillows and Flint snatches it from him, arching over him to keep Silver’s wrist pinned by his head. Silver’s eyes widen, as bright as the storm, and his other hand wriggles its way into Flint’s grip. He could break Flint’s hold easily, but his struggle is only a show, arms tightly muscled and gleaming. His expression is filled with that strange new trust they have forged, the wonder and deadly fascination Silver has for him now. His chest, striped with Flint’s scratches, is heaving. His hips stir, trying to find friction. Flint denies him and Silver whimpers.

Flint uncorks the bottle one-handed, letting the oil drip messily over his fingers. He lifts his hips from Silver’s and reaches behind himself. The position is difficult, if he wants to keep any weight pinning Silver’s wrists, but Silver definitely appreciates the way it causes Flint to pivot his torso and strain his thighs. Silver loves to watch how hard he gets just from this. Flint hooks two fingers inside himself and almost unbalances, lightningcracking so close to their cabin he can smell it. He readjusts to brace on Silver’s chest. Silver keeps his hands above his head, as if Flint is still holding them. His hips are churning, eyes feverish and greedy. He hisses as Flint pinches his nipple, lashes fluttering shut and teeth flashing. Heat radiates off him, and his hair forms a dark halo around his pained face. Flint takes mercy and withdraws his fingers, wrapping them instead around Silver’s cock. Silver sucks a lungful of air in relief, forcing his eyes back open so he can see Flint sink onto him. The stretch stings, but Flint wants it to sting. He wants it to ache for days.

He rides Silver with the peals of thunder rolling up his spine. The pace he sets is bruising, his hips rising and crashing down on Silver’s, filling himself in rough bursts that render Silver helpless. The wind shakes the walls and Flint arches, thighs tight around Silver.

Silver, unable to keep his hands still with discipline alone, claws his own hair, twining it around his fists. He jams his face against the corded muscle of his upper arm, whining. Flint clenches around him and Silver shudders, his hips twitching desperately beneath Flint. Flint relents, seating himself and bending over Silver to cup his cheek. His thumb presses Silver’s lower lip and Silver darts to catch it, licking and suckling with all the wet heat of his mouth. He bites, not sharply but to keep Flint close. Flint keeps them locked together, undulating on Silver with relentless pressure.

Silver begins to move with him, grinding in a counter-rhythm. His eyes crack open to watch Flint, as in the next motion he hits the spot that makes Flint shudder, almost collapsing on top of Silver.

‘Touch yourself,’ Silver pleads, Flint’s thumb still tugging his mouth. ‘I want you to come all over me.’

Flint nods, getting a hand around himself. The head of his cock is already slick, and it throbs in his grip. He works himself quickly, in jagged tugs that build with the coiling pressure inside him as Silver fucks him just right.

The booming thunder drowns out his yell when his pleasure crests and crashes, his come spattering over Silver’s bare skin. Silver moans, reaching down to slide his fingers through the mess, scooping some into his mouth. Flint, still clutching and quaking on top of him, stares as Silver mewls around his own fingers, seizing up as he comes. Flint rides through it until Silver bucks him off, groaning from overstimulation.

Flint careens to one side, landing face-first on the mattress and grinning. Silver fumbles for a rag and wipes himself clean, then tends to Flint’s thighs before sprawling beside him.

The storm grumbles, a quick succession of flashes sparking outside.

‘There’s a place in Maracaibo where it never stops storming,’ Silver says, spinning one of his beautiful lies. ‘Lightning strikes as often as a heart beats. There are as many bolts of it in the sky as there are trees in a forest, and the sand beneath the water is all turned to glass.’

Flint crosses his arms, propping his head on them to listen.

’The thunder is as loud as a cannon battle under the sea. You can hear it from two hundred miles away, ringing in your head for years. And it never rains.’

‘It didn’t rain tonight,’ Flint remarks.

‘I should hope not,’ Silver smiles. ‘It rains when you’re upset.’

Flint scowls, briefly thinking he must have fucked Silver senseless. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘When you’re agitated,’ Silver says, as if Flint doesn’t understand the word _upset_. ‘Hurt, worried, sad. It rains.’

‘We’re in _the Caribbean_ ,’ Flint reminds him. ‘It just rains here.’

‘It’s not just the Caribbean, though,’ Silver insists. ‘It’s you. Is it something you’ve always done?’

’I’ve always live places where it rains a lot, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Yes,’ Silver confirms, and in that high tone he uses when he’s persuading someone: ‘And why do you think that is?’

Flint remembers how fiercely it stormed ten years ago, the night his passions finally boiled over. There was thunder in his voice when he threatened Lord Alfred Hamilton. The fury he’d held at bay for so long flickered into life with lightning, chasing the Lord from his house.

The sky growled until the house rumbled when Thomas kissed him, and the rain roared against the windows when the Hamiltons took him to their bed. The storm was their shelter, submerging London, only the three of them caught in the eye of it.

Miranda had untied his hair, and Thomas had undressed him. He kissed one and then the other, and then one again. Thomas’ mouth discovered every uncharted inch of his skin, and they caressed and coveted him. He’d been good for little more than clinging to them, as though they’d be swept up in the deluge unless he held on.

He was laid bare between them, clasping Miranda’s hand as Thomas had swallowed his cock. It was nothing like the fleeting, functional experiences he’d had before. They took their time with him, confident the night would last for eternity. Thomas was as patient and determined as always, coaxing him open with gentle fingers. When had Thomas reached into him and crooked his fingers, he thrashed like a caught fish, his face pressed to Miranda’s hip and his legs locked around Thomas’ waist. Something reminded him that lightning began in the ground.

Miranda had cradled him in her lap as Thomas bent him in half and fucked him silly. He’d writhed and cried out, overwhelmed and overjoyed, the storm swallowing his voice. He squeezed his eyes shut and the musk of all three bodies mingled, the hands that petted and teased him were everywhere. When Miranda persuaded him to watch, to see, as he came undone between them, he could have drowned in how much they adored him. He hadn’t words for how he loved them back, and so the wind had spoken for him, howling and shaking the city.

And then, he recalls how often the English sky was bleak, blank, as opaque as the water below it. How it didn’t rain the day they lost Thomas, the clouds packed heavily enough to burst with no reprieve, the whole world cast so grey that twilight fell hours too soon.

How as a boy, he was sad when it rained. The gales would whistle off the coast in Padstow and make him fear for his grandfather’s fishing boat. Since he was a youth, the taste of ozone in the air inevitably ended with the taste of blood on his teeth, his knuckles splitting on someone’s face.

England, always overcast, where he’d realised he dreamt of something forbidden and kept it deep in the darkness. He’d found a part of himself out on the water, with the wind in his sails.

He’d called Silver a gust of wind, once. A gale had carried their warship as Flint seized it from Dufresne, and a breeze saved the Walrus from the Sargasso.

‘That ship-killer you pulled us through,’ Silver says. ‘It was one of yours.’

When it was only him and the storm, the sky and the water howling in chorus with his fury, the Walrus had tumbled through waves as high as the mast. Spires of deadly water knit the sea and sky together, and lightning had illuminated a path through his tempest. He had roared at the black clouds and they had roared back to him.

‘You really believe it’s my doing?’ Flint asks.

‘I _know_ you’re doing it,’ Silver flips onto his stomach, propping himself on his elbows to look Flint in the eye. ‘You’re the one who doesn’t.’

Flint leans into Silver’s side. ‘I never took you for a superstitious man.’

Silver sighs.

‘I’m not. But when a storm comes at your call?’ he takes Flint’s hand and runs it down his ruined leg. ‘Now, I can _feel it._ ’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please do yourself a favour and watch the London flashback scenes with closed captions, because [thunder rumbles] every time Flint is upset.   
>  Catatumbo lightning is real, but Silver is embellishing.


	14. fraying at the Edges

“The waves pound the pilings below and water rockets geyser up past our faces and explode in the air with spray so dense we’re drinking more than breathing, swallowing salt like those Foreign Legionnaires in the book Blitzer read, emerging from the desert lost and crazed with thirst but finding only ocean and forgetting how fish are full of fresh water.”

_What We Do Is Secret_ , Thorn Kief Hillsberry

* * *

Flint thrusts the shovel into the ground and Silver doesn’t say: _it looks fucking nothing like an oar_.

Flint tells Silver his name was James McGraw, and Silver thinks he already knew. But in the same breath, Flint says he _loved_ Thomas Hamilton.

Silver doesn’t know what’s more surprising: that he asks, or that Flint answers.

‘What was he like?’

And Flint smiles, more to himself than to Silver. He tells Silver how Thomas could persuade him of anything, and he doesn’t say _like you_ , though the possibility hangs between them. He talks of blue eyes and sharp wit, and the silhouette of Flint’s heart begins to take shape.

‘He was…’ and Flint hesitates, his voice fraying at the edges. ‘Everything I could have dreamed.’

‘What happened to him? Thomas?’ Silver asks. The lantern has burned so low between them that the shadows are falling deeper, and darker.

Flint’s face slips from the light. ‘He died.’

Time will make a liar of him twice.


	15. to hear only One

Madi tosses beside him, making soft noises in her sleep. Silver strokes her arm until she wakes, and she blinks slowly for a while before she recognises him.

‘Who do you dream about?’

It is a terribly rude question, Silver knows, but hardly the first he’s ever asked.

‘Not you,’ Madi’s voice is decisive, but warm.

‘Shame,’ Silver jokes, to cover the bleak truth they’ve acknowledged. They’re not meant for one another. But they’re not unhappy.

‘I told you,’ she continues. ‘It has a thousand voices. Do you remember?’

‘A thousand’ Silver echoes. ‘Isn’t it overwhelming?’

She chuckles in the darkness, rolling her head from his shoulder to his chest. ‘Isn’t it overwhelming to hear only one?’

‘Yes,’ he says it as a kiss on her forehead. ‘I suppose you’re right.’

He thinks, perhaps, the intimacy of being honest about the dreams might be its own kind of love. He hopes.

‘My mother told me she knew my father the moment she saw him, and she waited for him to recognise her back,’ she says. The sweetness of it is disarming, and so the next question hits him like a blow: ‘Does Flint know he’s yours?’

He tells her the truth.


	16. a Stain of Ink

“I made this place for you. A place for to love me. If this isn't a kingdom then I don't know what is.”

_Crush_ , Richard Siken

* * *

 

More nights than not, Flint sleeps with Silver curled around him, and he dreams. He tastes shark again, thinking he has bitten his tongue in the night. Awake and asleep, he is watching the moon wax, until the dark side of it is a sliver of deeper black against the night sky. He dreams himself trapped in luminous green fronds, unsure if it is seaweed, feathers, or ferns.

He loves the Maroon camp. The promise of it: peace, defiance, freedom, a place where they can be hidden. The crew has lingered here, where a fiction can be true, where the inevitable is not yet.

But sometimes the forest is so thick he cannot breathe, and he finds himself climbing to the cliffs, above the canopy of trees where the wind blows stiff off the water. Here, the sea and the sky are welded together without a joint.

He had once hooked an octopus, when his grandfather had taught him to fish with a rod. It was a black and seething thing, roiling and reaching and raging, tentacles stretching thin and impossibly long over the weathered wood of the pier. He had only watched its gleaming hide, its endlessly coiling limbs, and the clutching flesh of its suckers as it crawled and oozed and slithered to freedom, and he had thrilled when it vanished with barely a splash, leaving nothing but a stain of ink in its wake.

Such creatures were not meant for the light of day.

He thrusts two swords in the sand.

There is a rhythm to Silver’s gait like the steps of a dance Flint never needed teaching. There was Silver writing the impossible into existence as he scrawled _Division Bay_ before Flint’s eyes. From Silver’s lips, and only from Silver’s, Flint has heard a name he always knew.

Silver smiles, the loveliest one Flint has ever seen. His head cocks, his brows rise, and his eyes close against the brilliant sun. When they open, and find him watching, Flint remembers how it felt to drown.

He has to know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ‘The sea and sky were welded together without a joint’ is from _Heart of Darkness._. I truly did see an octopus escape a pier once.


	17. a practiced Hand and a wicked Laugh

Flint’s hands are all over him, mapping the grazes and bruises in their time apart. Here, between sheets, between walls, between shadows, Flint is sweet. With redcoat blood stained under his nails, with a vicious glint of victory in his eye, with a ferocious hunger in his teeth, he seizes Silver and kisses him. Silver is as breathless as he was twenty feet below the Walrus.

‘When you went under,’ Flint murmurs, as Silver gasps against his cheekbone. ‘What you’d said, about me and the water, I had to—I _wanted_ to believe you…’

He tastes salt, tears, his and Flint’s.

‘ _Ssh_ ,’ he purrs, cradling Flint’s skull. ‘I was lucky.’

The sea had delivered him for Flint. Neither of them say it.

Flint tightens around him, the two of them curled without a breath of air between them. The fur that covers Flint’s body tickles Silver with every restless attempt to pull him closer. Silver splays his fingers and presses them to Flint’s lower back, tender and firm. The spectre of loss is haunting them, so Silver kisses it away, trapping the desperate moan in Flint’s mouth, coaxing Flint’s tongue to meet Silver’s. Flint is pulling on his hair, likely harder than he intends to, but Silver only grunts into the kiss, nipping on Flint’s lip. It’s assurance they’re alive enough to hurt.

‘You have me,’ Silver promises. ‘You’ve got me.’

Flint nods, tracing the whorls of hair at the back of Silver’s neck, his forefinger and thumb around Silver’s spine. He digs in and Silver melts into it. Flint’s cock stirs against Silver’s thigh and his own twitches in response. Silver worms his way between their waists to touch, wrapping a hand around them both. Flint is so vocal tonight, whimpering onto Silver’s trembling lip. They’re soon both hard enough to be leaking, their bodies never still but never separate. Silver feels Flint’s pulse under his fingertips, and he drags his mouth down taste it at Flint’s throat. It flutters for him, jumping at the scrape of Silver’s teeth. Flint reaches to grip Silver’s ass, kneading possessively into the meat of it and grinding them together.

Silver would happily rut against Flint through to dawn, but that touch threatens to send him mad. He swivels and Flint tries to yank them back together, grappling at Silver’s hips. Silver shushes him, kissing his cheek before rolling away onto his good side. As he tucks his body back into the crook of Flint’s, Flint finally understands his intention. His touch returns to Silver’s rear, sliding down to his thighs and spreading them apart. Silver sighs as Flint props up the bad leg, working into the knotted muscle and easing away a lingering ache. Then he leans across to the bedside to procure a vial of oil —since they started sharing a bed, Silver had been delighted to learn Flint was never found without one—and is wrapped back around Silver the moment he has it.

Given how frantic he was to have Silver in his arms, Flint takes his time teasing Silver. An oiled finger trails from Silver’s balls to his tailbone, tapping over his hole, circling. Silver arches back into it and Flint dodges him, stroking the sensitised skin. Flint doesn’t breach until Silver is squirming, biting back curses and pleas. Then he opens Silver up with a practiced hand and a wicked laugh. He’s infuriatingly thorough, never giving Silver another finger before Silver is parched for it, close to sobbing when he finally gets what he wants. Flint alternates a scissoring, stretching motion with a curious exploration, finding just where to push that makes Silver swear and bite his own fist, tears prickling his eyes. His cock is so hard it hurts, straining against his belly and pulsing every time Flint flexes his fingers.

‘Please,’ Silver begs when Flint works a fourth into him. ‘I _need_ you to fuck me.’

Flint answers with a guttural ‘ _yeah_ ,’ that’s so familiar it makes Silver grin. His fingers withdraw and Silver immediately wants to howl from their absence, but then Flint sinks into him to the hilt. He reaches to pull on the groove of Silver’s hip, locking them together. The other arm snakes under Silver’s shoulder, Flint’s palm flattening on Silver’s chest. His chest is heaving, his hips stuttering, he realises as Flint secures him. Both hands keep Silver in place, letting him adjust to the fullness of it.

When Silver starts to breathe again, Flint withdraws, nearly slipping out before Silver hears himself keening pitifully. Flint slides home, and this time Silver moves with him, his body a mimicry of Flint’s. Pleasure ravages him, and the whole island is crumbling beneath them.

Silver would swear he feels Flint’s heart beating through his spine. The hand on his chest tightens, as though Flint’s trying to press Silver’s heart into his own.

Flint’s touch has crept to Silver’s cock, the rough pad of his thumb brushing the vein. Silver gasps, screwing himself back onto Flint, and Flint smears the gathering wetness down his shaft. His fist wraps around Silver’s cock and he pumps in conjunction with his thrusts. Silver sees stars behind his eyes.

He arches and Flint arches with him, he pulls himself inward and Flint hooks around him. Silver writhes between Flint’s hand and his cock, the sensation of both flooding him. He’s clinging to the forearm locked across his front, his fingers digging in so desperately they will leave ten purple bruises among a thousand red freckles. His voice is hoarse with wordless cries for more, for Flint to stay inside him forever, to be the undertow, to keep them both in the depths.

Flint noses his way free from where he’s buried himself in Silver’s curls, his lips on Silver’s earlobe.

‘My liege,’ Flint whispers, and there’s nobody else in the world he’d let call him that. ‘ _Mine_.’

Tonight, if only tonight, there are two kings in Nassau.

Or, there is one monster with two hearts and one voice and too many teeth.


	18. as easy as Coincidence

“I remember black skies, the lightning all around me  
I remembered each flash as time began to blur  
Like a startling sign that fate had finally found me  
And your voice was all I heard; that I get what I deserve.”

_New Divide,_ Linkin Park

* * *

 

Flint asks about Silver’s new shadow, when they are left a moment in the middle of it all.

‘Hands?’ Silver shrugs. ‘He’s some heartbroken and bloodthirsty old redhead driven half-mad by this place. I seem to attract them.’

Flint laughs. Silver leans into him, imperceptible to anyone else. He is a line of warmth along Flint's right side, ending abruptly at the knee.

‘He fears you’ll be done with me someday. He thinks it’s inevitable.’

‘And do you still believe nothing is inevitable?’ Flint asks.

Silver looks out, squinting at the horizon. He tilts his head, and Flint startles at how well it mirrors his own expression.

‘You carve people,’ Silver says. ‘You strip things from them. Whittle them into the tools you need.’

Flint listens.

‘You cut rather a large part out of me,’ Silver smiles, unnervingly. ‘You made me a weapon.’

No apology comes to Flint’s tongue. He only reaches, the back of his hand touching Silver’s thigh. Silver’s knuckles brush along his, as easy as a coincidence, until they interlock for a moment.

‘But there’s something cut out of you, as well.’

Silver is so very sharp.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Linkin Park, you ask? If you have read my other silverflint fic you’ll know I’m deaf and thus completely absolved of having good taste in music.


	19. new Things bleed

Silver has begun to hear Flint’s cadence in his own voice.

New things bleed into his dreams: soft glass, and writing, and two hard thunking sounds. Soon, a dream whispers his own name to him, a name nobody has used in many years. He startles awake, shaking.

He dispatches a messenger to Savannah.


	20. all Monsters know

_“_ But rational conjectures of this kind, however entertaining, don’t explain the whole activity of the monstrous imagination, which revels in excess and assemblage; tricephalous and multilimbed, with arthropod and reptilian features such as ruffs, tusks, fangs, tentacles, and jaws, many of these primordial monsters are hybrids defying nature. They belong to dark places, those underworlds under land and sea—volcanoes, ocean abysses—because they embody our lack of understanding, and mirror it in their savagery and disorderly, heterogeneous asymmetries of shape. For this reason, at the same time that Olaus Magnus was making his marine map, artists conjured extremes of physical monstrosity to convey spellbound states, in which perverse desires are spoken and thrilling moral transgressions follow.”

_Here Be Monsters_ , Marina Warner

* * *

It happens deep in the forest.

Sailors tell tales of _aspidoceleon_ , beasts so great they are mistaken for islands, that dive back into the abyss and drown every man upon them. Scylla was both the cliff Odysseus sailed through, and the monster that devoured his crew. Things that are earth and wood and bone and doom. But there are krakens and chimaeras made of ink on the edges of every map, in the parts yet uncharted, the places hidden. They are a way of filling the empty space, a warning and a welcome.

They could have drowned the world in a hurricane and torn the earth into the sea.

Flint wonders if all monsters know how to do is tear each other to pieces. If such creatures were not meant for the light of day.

He’d forgotten it was a love story.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Marina Warner also wrote _Indigo_ , my favourite version of _The Tempest._


	21. for their own Sins

“The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.”

_Heart of Darkness,_ Joseph Conrad

* * *

 

The crew had hated him when he first appointed himself their voice. They had beaten him for their own sins when he described them in his speeches.

Flint had hated him, when he’d had been the one to reveal that the gold was gone. And he was hated again, for this. For delivering the truth that everyone believed to be a lie.

Perhaps that is where he is best. Perhaps that is all he should be. A messenger.

The day they arrive in Savannah, the sun shines so brilliantly that Silver cannot bear to leave the coach.

For the rest of his life, he will dream of the sea.


	22. the incoming Tide

“He was soon borne away by the waves, lost in darkness and distance.”

_Frankenstein,_ Mary Shelley

* * *

 

The problem with Flint, James thinks, is that he doesn’t just disappear back into the night.

They live by the sea.

James had believed they would find their hidden place inland. But Thomas seemed to sense he wouldn’t survive so far from the water, and besides, when James had spoken of his pastoral ambitions, Thomas had said:

‘My darling, the next time a man gives me a hoe, I plan to kill him with it.’

So Thomas had compromised on some chickens, and James had compromised on this cove. They can hear the waves from the cottage, and walk to the town around the next bay. James fishes from the pier and Thomas takes up bookkeeping and they are ridiculously, unfathomably happy.

Something of Flint lingers, in the blood-red dawn, and the thunderhead that follows. Sometimes, a strange wind blows from the south and salt-spray dances off the waves. Sometimes, he wonders if it was John Silver who came out of the sea, a man with no past, no future.

James walks barefoot on the line of the incoming tide. It is a drizzly morning, a pattern of raindrops dotting the sand. Waves lap at his toes, foaming and tugging the sand away beneath his step. Thomas is letting out the chickens from the coop, their chuckling just audible over the soft but insistent swell. The sky is a patchwork of rainclouds, casting shadows stirred on the water by the squalling breeze.

Something has washed in on the tide: a shell, maybe, that Thomas will treasure as it dries on the windowsill. It bobs with each wave that picks it up, threatening to drift back out, before tumbling further up the beach. James’ path crosses it, and he realises it isn’t a shell. It’s a bottle, corked shut.

It’s glass, worn smooth by sand.

He doesn’t hear Thomas approach, but doesn’t startle when hands slip around his waist. Thomas tucks his chin over James’ shoulder, kissing his jaw. James leans back into the warmth and the weight of him.

As he uncorks the bottle, Thomas makes a curious ‘ _hm_ ’ that tickles James’ neck. James scrunches his shoulders, turning to one side to nuzzle Thomas’ face. The water is around their ankles now.

Paper is furled inside the bottle, twisted so tightly on itself James struggles to unroll it. He balks when he sees the name at the top of the first page, even as he recognises the scrawling penmanship.

_Dear James,_

_I never wrote as well as I spoke. I never told the truth as well as I lied. And I never asked you to forgive me._

(He finds he’s trembling, holding the paper tight to keep the wind from snatching it away, to be sure Thomas is reading over his shoulder and this isn’t a vivid dream.)

_I should bury this in the ground, like you buried it all, out of spite. But having nowhere to address it—since I cannot believe you remain in Savannah—I will send this letter into the sea. She has always bent to your will (but we all did, didn’t we?) She will deliver this where it belongs, whether that’s to the depths, or to you. I find I can imagine you reading it, as I’m sure you imagine me writing it now. I find you often. I find you everywhere._

_You were right: you will be the end of me. You have_ _been_ _the end of me. You were right about more than you think._

_You asked me about my past. I am sure you knew by then what you were asking. You knew that I had been certain of it for a long time. You were asking if I was your future. I find I still can’t tell you, but here are the things I have dreamt of, for as long as I have had a past:_

_Two stones clacking together. A spark._

_A black moon on red stars._

_Stumbling, unbalanced._

_The taste of raw fish._

_Green feathers._

_And the name, James McGraw._

(James’ fingers slip over the words as if they will disappear, and he takes a shuddering breath. The truth of it is just below, in ink and paper, too late.)

_It was you. It was always you, and I was always yours, and never enough._

_As you told me the nightmare before the dawn was temporary; as the mantle of James Flint was temporary; I wondered if the thing entangling us was not also meant to be temporary. I tell myself you were a nightmare._

_You were a nightmare, but you were mine._

_What could I do, if I was made to love you, but deliver you back to him?_ _I hope you’re happy. Nobody ever says that and means it sincerely, but god, I hope you are happy. Because I’m not. But I am_

_yours,_

_Solomon Little_

A wave crashes into his knees, and he traces over the textured surface of the bottle again.

‘How did it _get_ here?’ is all James can ask, in the face of everything else.

‘You’ve always had a way,’ Thomas answers, as if it is as simple as that.

Maybe it is as simple as that.

‘Are you all right?’ Thomas asks. James dashes the tears from his eyes with a forefinger and thumb, letting the paper coil back on itself.

‘It’s… nothing I didn’t know,’ he reasons.

Thomas is too sharp for so easy an answer. ‘That doesn’t mean it won’t hurt.’

Maybe this was all any of it meant: to be here, in Thomas’ arms, as he reads it. Maybe everything before was only an omen. Maybe that’s enough.

He goes back inside, with Thomas. Maybe a lie is better than the truth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Honestly, I was going to end it here. Then I realised it’s my story and I’m allowed to make up happy endings once in a while.


	23. so They can find their Way

“Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”

Fernando Sabino (origin contested)

* * *

 

Thomas wakes to the wind whistling, in the particular way it does when James is up to mischief. He’s alone in the bed, but the mattress is warm beside him. Slivers of pink sunlight are peeking through the shutters.

‘Sleep on it,’ Thomas had suggested, when the letter unraveled everything inside James. A storm had brought the dusk early, and James tossed and turned all the night. Thomas’ dreams had bled into waking, because Thomas always dreams of thunder.

He rises, tilting the shutters to flood the cottage with scarlet. James has boiled him an egg, set on a plate with bread and smoked mackerel. Steam curls from the spout of the teapot.

On the table are James’ favourite books, stacked and strapped together with an old belt. Thomas folds a few of his things in a bundle and sets it beside them.

He turns the chickens out and props the gate open, so they can find their way to the neighbour’s yard.

James is eyeing the little sloop moored at the end of the pier. He might deny it if asked, but that boat has drawn his attention since the day they first came to the cove.

‘Can two men crew it?’ Thomas asks, taking his hand.

James shrugs optimistically, his lip quirking into a crooked smile. ‘You’re a fast learner.’

A southerly gust picks up and James turns to face it, eyes narrowing curiously. It toys with his hair, tugging a lock of red threaded with silver, teasing it just the way Thomas likes to.

‘Where do we sail?’ Thomas asks.

Flint says a word Thomas has waited to hear for a lifetime.

’Maracaibo.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! There are lots of little clues and details throughout this story that only make sense with the last two chapters, so it's designed to be enjoyable on the re-read if you come back. Comments are really appreciated—this was a really experimental fic for me so I hope it worked for you!


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